Blu-ray or HD DVD? Yawn — who cares?
Published by Admin on 24.9.06 at 9/24/2006 05:12:00 PM.
First, there was the war between eight-track tapes and cassettes. Then there was Betamax vs. VHS. Now a new battle for the future of home entertainment is once again forcing consumers to choose.
High-definition DVDs are supposed to provide sharp, wide-screen images to fill the more than 30 million HD television sets that have been sold. They are also meant to replace standard-definition DVDs, providing studios with a new source of profits.
But after much anticipation, the two competing formats have debuted to a big yawn.
Retailers report slow sales of the expensive machines required to play the new discs as gun-shy consumers wait for one of the formats to prevail. And studios have held back issuing high-def versions of their most-desired titles because so few players exist.
"I'm not jumping on this bandwagon yet," said John Scally, a 39-year-old in Elizabeth, N.J., who has already spent thousands of dollars on a high-def TV set and subscribes to HD channels through his satellite TV provider.
"They probably would tempt me if it wasn't for the two formats," Scally said. "I'm a semi-early adopter, but I'll wait at least a year, maybe two, for this to play out."
Complicating the choice is the increasing availability of movies and TV shows for download online, bypassing the need for a physical disc format.
Apple Computer Inc. just launched its long-awaited movie download store as well as a slim device called iTV designed to wirelessly stream movies from a computer or other storage device to a TV set. Link
High-definition DVDs are supposed to provide sharp, wide-screen images to fill the more than 30 million HD television sets that have been sold. They are also meant to replace standard-definition DVDs, providing studios with a new source of profits.
But after much anticipation, the two competing formats have debuted to a big yawn.
Retailers report slow sales of the expensive machines required to play the new discs as gun-shy consumers wait for one of the formats to prevail. And studios have held back issuing high-def versions of their most-desired titles because so few players exist.
"I'm not jumping on this bandwagon yet," said John Scally, a 39-year-old in Elizabeth, N.J., who has already spent thousands of dollars on a high-def TV set and subscribes to HD channels through his satellite TV provider.
"They probably would tempt me if it wasn't for the two formats," Scally said. "I'm a semi-early adopter, but I'll wait at least a year, maybe two, for this to play out."
Complicating the choice is the increasing availability of movies and TV shows for download online, bypassing the need for a physical disc format.
Apple Computer Inc. just launched its long-awaited movie download store as well as a slim device called iTV designed to wirelessly stream movies from a computer or other storage device to a TV set. Link